Talking Germanyhttp://blogs.dw.com/talking-germany
Blog with Peter CravenMon, 27 Oct 2014 00:00:13 +0000en-GBhourly1Ellen Ueberschär’s Movie Pickhttp://blogs.dw.com/talking-germany/?p=5495
http://blogs.dw.com/talking-germany/?p=5495#respondMon, 27 Oct 2014 00:00:13 +0000http://blogs.dw.com/talking-germany/?p=5495As a theologian, and a prominent member of Germany’s Lutheran Protestant Church, it’s interesting that Ellen Ueberschär’s favourite movie of all time should be the 1988 drama Einer trage des anderen Last – Bear Ye One Another’s Burden. It’s the story of the confrontation between a committed Marxist and a Protestant pastor. I remember seeing the movie in what was then still East Berlin and feeling very strongly that the Berlin Wall would soon fall.

“He helped to start a new way of thinking, encouraging people to use their own brains and think for themselves.” Was he a very German figure? “Well, he had strong opinions. He was impulsive and uncompromising. Those are German traits. He certainly triggered developments that divided Germany through to the present day.” It’s Ellen Ueberschär – my latest guest on Talking Germany – speaking about theologian Martin Luther, the central figure in the Protestant reformation.

Ellen Ueberschär is herself a trained theologian and a prominent member of Germany’s Protestant Lutheran Church and this idea of people “thinking for themselves” is at the very heart of what she stands for. But, as she points out, the reformation divided the country. What, I therefore wonder, about the other great German division – a divide that she experienced not through the history books but at first hand? “Well, I spent my formative years in communist East Germany. And there’s no doubt about it: we were trapped in a country that we didn’t like.”

We’re currently marking the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, I point out. The question is still: are we overcoming the divisions that existed between the people of the two former Germany’s – east and west? “If you compare people in eastern Germany with their neighbours in say Poland or the Czech Republic, then things have gone well. But that’s not always the comparison people make. People still spend too much time talking about what they can or can’t buy and too little talking about freedom.”

For Ellen Ueberschär, that freedom is central: “My father had an interesting expression for how we used to live. He always said that we were “hedgehoging” behind the Wall. What he meant was that we didn’t have a clue about what was going on in the rest of the world. But I was lucky. I had an open-minded family, open-minded parents. I learnt to have my own opinion.” To think for herself. “You know,” Ellen Ueberschär adds: “I thought more than many people in the West about my existence, about who I am. About values.”

]]>http://blogs.dw.com/talking-germany/?feed=rss2&p=54990Claus Hipp’s Movie Pickhttp://blogs.dw.com/talking-germany/?p=5487
http://blogs.dw.com/talking-germany/?p=5487#respondFri, 17 Oct 2014 14:40:07 +0000http://blogs.dw.com/talking-germany/?p=5487Claus Hipp has been a keen equestrian all his life. Perhaps he has always dreamt of riding a chariot. Certainly, his favourite film of all time features the most famous chariot race in movie history. It is, of course, the 1959 epic Ben-Hur.

]]>http://blogs.dw.com/talking-germany/?feed=rss2&p=54870Episodes in a story quietly told, with Claus Hipphttp://blogs.dw.com/talking-germany/?p=5457
http://blogs.dw.com/talking-germany/?p=5457#respondFri, 17 Oct 2014 10:00:50 +0000http://blogs.dw.com/talking-germany/?p=5457Or: “You don’t have to say that any more!”

Musician, artist, linguist, equestrian, entrepreneur: he’s an outstanding representative of the Mittelstand – the medium-sized, family-run companies often described as the backbone of the German economy. He’s Claus Hipp – my latest guest on Talking Germany. Before the show he tells me about an aspect of his family’s story that doesn’t get a lot of publicity.

“My uncle was mayor of Regensburg under the Nazis and denied Hitler permission to hold a speech in the town. He spent months in the Dachau concentration camp. And my aunt was a secret courier, who smuggled a copy of the Nazi-critical papal encyclical With Burning Anxiety into Germany. It was read from the pulpits of Catholic churches around the country. She looked so innocent. But if they’d caught her, they would have shot her.”

His father and a friend also apparently took big risks: “They waited for trains on their way to Dachau when they stopped at their local station in the town of Pfaffenhofen. They opened up some of the carriages, giving people a chance to get out.” And, he adds: “He also gave shelter to a number of Jewish citizens – something that only emerged after his death in 1967.” The message is: this wasn’t heroics. This, Claus Hipp clearly believes, is what more Germans ought to have done.

Now in his seventies, Claus Hipp says he has never shaken off his memories of the Nazis. “I felt then, and have always felt, a terrible fear of uniforms.” So what was his first memory of liberation? “Well, my father and I were walking down the street one day when the headmaster from my school came our way. ‘Heil Hitler!’ I shouted, as I had always done. ‘You don’t have to say that any more,’ my father told me: ‘Just say Grüß Gott!’”

]]>http://blogs.dw.com/talking-germany/?feed=rss2&p=54570Stefanie-Lahya Aukongo’s Movie Pickhttp://blogs.dw.com/talking-germany/?p=5431
http://blogs.dw.com/talking-germany/?p=5431#respondMon, 13 Oct 2014 00:00:17 +0000http://blogs.dw.com/talking-germany/?p=5431Stefanie is one of those people who doesn’t have to think for a moment about her favourite movie of all time. And it is: the 2008 drama The Secret Life of Bees. Which, by the way, was produced by Will Smith and stars, among others, Queen Latifah and Alicia Keys. One to look out for.